I guess this would largely depend on the kind of connection error you're getting and how long the system retries for ARP replies if the host is indeed not down. I have just tried this on windows and it times out – you can of course raise the timeout level – eventually the OS will realize that the host is down and forward this back to the client. Since this is originally a python bug, I'll file another one in its place to allow for setting the bootstrap timeout in the constructor. Otherwise there's not much else that can be done about this, as it's expected behavior.

Mark Nunberg (Inactive)
added a comment - 30/Jan/14 5:26 PM I guess this would largely depend on the kind of connection error you're getting and how long the system retries for ARP replies if the host is indeed not down. I have just tried this on windows and it times out – you can of course raise the timeout level – eventually the OS will realize that the host is down and forward this back to the client. Since this is originally a python bug, I'll file another one in its place to allow for setting the bootstrap timeout in the constructor. Otherwise there's not much else that can be done about this, as it's expected behavior.